Hits From The Box #120 - Tree Building

(NOTE - I wrote this weeks ago, while drinking White Russians).

I just put up my first Xmas tree. At 34. While listening to this.

The Red Cords kick us off with their breakneck garage punk. Vile Guy is six tracks of smashed out riffs, dirty red-lined vocals, and a drum racket that echoes from the annals of the booziest, spikiest punk history. Delivered with a snarl and a twinkle in the eye, Vile Guy leaves nothing left, everything expended and spent, sweat soaked and bludgeoned, cracked teeth gleaming from a maniacal smile.

Holy shit. Lyon's Herr Geisha & the Boobs are not what you expect. Book Of Mutations is a one track album of brutal rock, taking the harder edges of Shellac, Slint and Sleep and smashing it against a brick wall, a Necronomicon of noise and nihilism, fraying the fabric of sanity. A mutation in every sense, the trio manage to shapeshift into garage rock mavens for a few minutes here, doom soothsayers for a few minutes there, always maintaining a tightly-coiled focus on manipulated menace. Big, brave, brutal, brilliant.


 

Operator is a krautrock-worshipping wunderkind four-piece from Brooklyn whose swirling EP Puzzletronics I is breathtaking in its sinuous dexterity and distorted force. Their insidious rhythms aren't built to lull and beguile - they are set to destroy. The effects that permeate these five tracks seem designed to tap into your core energies and send them haywire, a hypnotic maelstrom that connotes both chaos and cool assurance. Even when things get technicolour and weird, like Raincoats-esque closer 'EE UNSH', the band never let go. Dara Hirsch mutters on 'Requirements', "Whose side are you on at the end of the day?" I don't think I have a choice - Operator are in control. 

Over to Toronto now and Fresh Snow. They released their latest EP Won through Hand Drawn Dracula a few months ago, and while I love their instrumental take on dissonant melody and noise as movement (baring similarities to Canadian contemporaries Holy Fuck),  I have been sucked in by their collaboration with Pink Eye AKA Daniel Abrahams from Fucked Up. The title alone drags me in - 'Don't Fuck A Gift Horse In The Mouth' - a slow-building motorik behemoth then bursts forth, mesmeric before the obligatory Pink Eye howl. The entire EP is breathtaking too, elegiac in places, loudly insistent in most others. Great stuff.

Now for some light jangle from Melbourne's Grandstands. 'Stranger (In A Sense)' is a precursor to their upcoming album coming out on Whalesmouth. Sundappled yacht amble from the 'burbs, the track oozes languid sun-drunk blase - no absolutes. They aren't even assertive in their song title! Relax and forget about it.

I used to live and work in a small country town in Australia called Roma. Weird. aren't from that Roma, but the infinitely cooler Italian namesake of Rome in Italy. Yet the name of their album, A Long Period of Blindness, taps into my experiences there - whether it be through inanity or long bouts of drinking to get through said inanity. This album is not inane, though -  it's a monster of dark psych, showering shoegaze and pummelling rhythms that washes over you like a black tide. It is also eloquent - there is a delicateness that underscores the gloss and reverb that penetrates. There are obvious touchstones to Swervedriver and Slowdive in the likes of 'Infinite Decay' and the knowing 'Gaze' respectively, and as the sweeping ominous closer 'Swans' hits, the lyric 'Why do I drown?' is both poignant and heart-rending. 

 

Human Ottoman is a Portland trio who specialise in making beautiful, chaotic noise - but not the way you might expect. There is a drumkit, a cello and a vibraphone, a bunch of effects - and that's it. Farang doesn't put that into perspective - the percussion sounds like a choir of cavemen mauling the monolith, basslines that thrum in the chest but cease to exist, the graceful strings that can shudder and be torn asunder at the drop of sanity. Penned as "polyrhythmic world-metal", the album manages to cross borders, join boundaries, blur cultural touchstones, to create something strange and intoxicating. Again I use the word chaos in a review - but that is what Farang is. Elegant, calibrated, and wondrous, sure - but chaos nonetheless. Like Tortoise and A Silver Mt Zion decided to band together to make a pop album, a free jazz album and a mainstream rock album, then gave up and threw clippings of all three efforts into one congealed mess. Fascinating stuff.


Happy Sunday everyone!

Hits From The Box #93 - Flicking Nets

The Internet is a great thing - especially in January in London, when everyone is poor and miserable and out of pocket. This month I have discovered the brilliance that is Netflix, and have been spending most nights watching movies and TV shows til all hours. Current favourite is the Mark Duplass/Nick Kroll fronted The League - how haven't more people seen this hilarious show? Also watching Southern dark dramas - Mud, Joe, Blue Ruin... This rabbithole is dank and dark. Still, I need to focus and get back into writing, otherwise I'll fuse with the couch. Actually I am writing this on the couch - so it's pretty much the same thing.

Let's start off with new Brisbane band Eyes Ninety. Featuring members of bands such as Chinese Burns, The Standing 8 Counts, Eat Laser Scumbag! and Happy Times, the four piece revel in a running the rusted tightrope between 80s Aussie pub punk like Cosmic Psychos or the Onyas and 70s blazed rock - the end result is dusting off a relic that you didn't even know was missing, placing it pride of place on the middle of the mantelpiece, then getting shitfaced and breaking every glass surface in the house.

A change of pace if not one of visceral temerity comes from Bristol's Giant Swan, a new signing to Howling Owl Records (Spectres, Towns, Oliver Wilde). Giant Swan is a shapeshifting beat duo that are intent on tearing down the fibres of your being and leaving you abandoned, nerves frayed, mind lost. Robin Stewart and Harry Wright have recorded this self-titled EP (pressed on clear vinyl) live and in the moment, so there is a hiccoughing, burping, heaving immediacy that envelops wholly. This is a noise experiment that has nefarious global intentions - the kind of industrial drone that intends on shackling the mainstream and the slipstream into one agonised seething mass, all locked together and Giant Swan slammed into their earholes ad nauseum. This madness - we've (thankfully) brought it on ourselves.

Set the phasers to the heart of the sun with Wondermoth around. The Kent collective love revelling in woozy pop malaise, taking things slow and perilously close to the wintry sun, a psychedelic soft boil, eyelids at half mast, hair feathered out, bodies weightless. 'It Comes In Circles' is the first time in ages where an unadulterated phaser pedal has made me nod in approval - it's so dirty yet somehow sonorous and purely otherworldly too. I like this.

Getting decidedly more sun-swept and lazy now with Melbourne's Grandstands, another band fitting into the bustling pigeonhole of slow jangle, drawled minutiae and sun shining through the foliage onto the goon bag of lost adult adolescence. Single 'Getting Out' is closest to earlier Ocean Party than other band throwing this at the wall at the moment, and yet such familiarity does nothing to obscure the face that this is a great track. Seeing as it's been worked on by Josh Bach (from Milk Teddy - where have those guys been?) and Case Rice, it sounds great. And there is a song here called 'Forest Hill', and I live in a place called Forest Hill, so it's almost like its about me ("But how wrong was I?")

I'm disappearing into the percolating crawl of evitceles. The Bulgarian artist looks to Andy Stott, Actress and Four Tet as spirit animals, throws us a breathing apparatus, and takes on a chrysalis-exploring journey of the internal. Churning out sounds at an alarming rate, I'm only coming out of Underwater I to find Underwater II has been waiting for me. Newest track 'Watching You Unconsciously' is creepy in its industrial melt, a glitchy sermon from beneath the earth. There is something ethereal yet innately dangerous about evitceles' work that has me in constant thrall.

Let's finish up with NYC darlings, Darlings. Their new album Feel Better comes out on Tuesday, and it's a pastiche of perennial guitar pop mastery that proves that these stuff will continue to be made, and made well, til the ends of time. There are coy stabs at grungey riffs that break into a twee jangle a la Custard ('Strap'), a stand up rock tune in 'Garrone', a C86 pop gem in 'Always Remember' and the raucous Lemonheads of 'AV Community Events'. It is this kind of record that makes me smile despite myself, realise that as shit as the world can get, it can't get that shit, there will always be good, even if it's losing an unwinnable fight, because the good never gives up. It's a great, fun record

Happy Sunday everyone!